06.15.09

Summary: Microsoft’s very latest tricks with schools around the world are dissected and explained

A couple of days ago we wrote about ‘funny money’ which Microsoft would supposedly give to Mississippi. The short story is that it’s not real money and it may actually help Microsoft elevate revenue rather than suffer from fines. Now, from Mississippi we move on to Missouri, which evidently turns its students to Microsoft customers, no matter if they like it or not. We have covered many similar stories recently [1, 2, 3, 4]. It’s a form of child abuse to assign a commercial master to youngsters/adolescents so early in their lives (and leaving them no choice).

Wisconsin schools in line for millions of dollars in Microsoft vouchers

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The settlement lays out $75 million to $80 million in reimbursements for a wide range of technology products and services. The exact amount is still being determined.

Why can’t Microsoft be properly fined? Why can’t there be no real punishment to prove that markets rules are effective and thus discourage repeated offences? Those who consider it a win for Wisconsin simply don’t understand this simple old trick. Almost all journalists happily ignore the other side of the coin and instead deliver just the message which requires zero investigation. See for example:

Citizenship Manager for Microsoft in Nigeria, Jummai Umar-Ajijola said the Innovative Teachers Forum, which is a part of Microsoft’s Partners in Learning (PiL) programme, is a reflection of Microsoft’s commitment to bridging the digital divide in Africa’s education.
The two-day Forum, hosted by Microsoft in association with SchoolNet was also an opportunity for participating teachers to exchange best practices and share experiences with their peers from across the various states of the country.

The lunacy of the EPO with its patent maximalism will likely go unchecked (and uncorrected) if Battistelli gets his way and turns the EPO into another SIPO (Croatian in the human rights sense and Chinese in the quality sense)

Another long installment in a multi-part series about UPC at times of post-truth Battistelli-led EPO, which pays the media to repeat the lies and pretend that the UPC is inevitable so as to compel politicians to welcome it regardless of desirability and practicability

Implementing yet more of his terrible ideas and so-called 'reforms', Battistelli seems to be racing to the bottom of everything (patent quality, staff experience, labour rights, working conditions, access to justice etc.)

"Good for trolls" is a good way to sum up the Unitary Patent, which would give litigators plenty of business (defendants and plaintiffs, plus commissions on high claims of damages) if it ever became a reality

Microsoft's continued fascination with and participation in the effort to undermine Alice so as to make software patents, which the company uses to blackmail GNU/Linux vendors, widely acceptable and applicable again